Spontaneous Currents

You might get the sense that things just happen to Joel Grip. During our TOAST shoot in London, a man stopped to dance while the Swedish musician played his upright bass. “Extremely generous – he passed through the image and disappeared, and I’ll never see him again,” says Joel. Afterwards, as he carried his instrument through the streets, a woman around 80 years old offered him a bass that her 92-year-old companion owned but could no longer play due to arthritis. Joel immediately went over to their home, met its long-term owner, Pete, and left with “this beautiful bass from 1851,” he says in awe. “I still cannot believe it. When I’ve fixed it, I will play a concert for them.”

Joel’s warmth and curiosity are naturally inviting. But staying open to possibility is a core part of his existence as an improvising musician, a spirit he exudes in hope of what energy it might spark. Most recently, he has been on tour as part of أحمد [Ahmed]. Made up of pianist Pat Thomas, saxophonist Seymour Wright, drummer Antonin Gerbal and Joel, the band exists to channel the spirit of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a twentieth-century African American bassist who played with Thelonious Monk among others, and who led a band that would often play three ferocious sets a night for six months. Their latest album, سماع [Sama'a], demonstrates their breathless virtuosity and taste for extremes. “You can reach your limits really fast, and I think that failure is important because of the trust that it implies, with your bandmates or with the audience,” says Joel. “And when that is established, there’s actually no failure, and then you can really start being creative.”

As well as the history of jazz, Joel sees intrinsic links between their music and dance. “Most of the time, you’re supposed to be the musician –‘the bass player stands like this’, and that’s it. But what happens if I move while I play, or turn the bass upside down? If everybody is doing that at the same time, it turns into this moving picture.”

It’s this kinetic fury that’s seen أحمد [Ahmed] break through to audiences not typically inclined towards improv jazz. “I’m so thankful for that, because it can be a dark hole to fall into when you play for the same people,” says Joel. “I think it’s because as an audience, you feel you are invited to take part in the creation of the music. Because you’re listening. It feeds back into how we’re producing the music, but it also means that your body can’t stand still. Usually if you go out to dance, you see a DJ, but no musicians – there’s no connection to the instruments or to the performance. Or you might see a band doing the act of being a jazz or pop band. But we go beyond categories, and people ask me: ‘Can I see your hands? How is that possible?’ I say, you’re right, I don’t know, but my spiritual friend Ahmed Abdul-Malik did it every night, and to be able to do this music, we just have to do it more.”

Joel doesn’t do boundaries. He credits his mother, “a big organiser and initiative taker”, for his DIY spirit. She also let him organise the 15-year-strong improv festival Hagenfesten on her farm, turning a barn into a stage and a pigsty into a bar. Having moved to Baltimore to study, then Paris and now Berlin, he isn’t shy about challenging local musical conventions. The jazz scene of his current home, he says, “has been very strict – for 20 years, it was very reduced and minimalistic, you have to be very careful of not stepping outside the borders. I don’t want to feel I’m not allowed to move – improvising is a way of connecting to memory and that’s connected to music, like your body is a big USB stick.”

Joel even managed to unravel a highly scripted scenario. He was one of the musicians who played on the OST for Brady Courbet’s The Brutalist, thanks to his prior collaborations with composer Daniel Blumberg (they’re also in a group called Vaka). Playing the bassist in a jazz club scene, Joel and his fellow actor-musicians asked to jettison the fake instruments to perform for real: “We had just two minutes to play at the highest intensity of the music,” says Grip. “It was one of the first scenes of shooting, and it really set a mood for the whole film because the actors actually danced.”

It’s improv as life philosophy, not just musical technique. “It can have therapeutic aspects, of course,” says Joel. “It’s a way of taking yourself more seriously and a way of being more precise in what you want.” It means you’re ready to receive fleeting beauty, too – or maybe a historic double bass: “to take care of those moments,” says Joel. “To be sensitive to that, and wake up.”

Joel wears the TOAST Brushed Cotton Revere Collar Jacket and Duncan Brushed Cotton Trousers.

Words by Laura Snapes.

Photography by Billy Barraclough.